"Last May, EFF reported that a sheriff’s office in Texas searched data from more than 83,000 automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras to track down a woman suspected of self-managing an abortion."
Making examples out of some number of unlucky peasants over otherwise trivial deviance that harms nearly nobody is one of the key jobs of men at arms.
Now, they may spend more time on "real crime" or collecting taxes by other names, but make no mistake this sort of stuff is stuff they (as an agency) must do if they are to properly serve the interests of their master.
They literally think they are doing the work of some divine creator. They have plenty of time to ruin the lives of other people because they think it saves their own.
And many of these people really do need their Good Works on the force to do the saving, because God knows what they do to their wives and kids back home.
They also believe in eternal torture as punishment. If someone doesn't accept their god, their god will send that person's soul to hell to be tortured forever. Therefore, essentially anything can be justified to force people to accept their god, since no finite amount of harm can exceed the infinite torture of hell.
People who believe that sort of thing are, IMO, extremely evil, and worshiping an evil deity.
> from more than 83,000 automated license plate reader
This feels purposefully misleading. Did they manually watch hours and hours of footage, or is this the equivalent of "I searched an online corpus of hundreds of millions of documents" (I Googled it)
Sure, call it that. They Googled it on their comperensive, nation-wide, unlimited access, fully indexed and integrated surveillance network (with 83,000 edge nodes)
We had a lady down here in Estonia working for police. She used their extensive databases for non-work related reasons and got, very publicly, fired. She decided to appeal and lost. Through all levels of court up to the EU one. So for years, there would be a newspaper headline “remember that person who invaded your privacy? Still guilty”. Could not wish for a more impactful public execution.
It's no longer safe to even use a period tracking app in many US states now. The women I know are all cautioning each other to go back to pen and paper, and ditch anything app based.
Most of us here knows ways around this, but many people are not educated.
One method is get off your smart phone and boot tails and do the searches there. Maybe that is something EFF can make known. Like list trusted onion sites that have information where women can go and get help.
One reason the government surveillance is important is I've read there is a growing movement among the right-to-lifers to hold women who abort criminally liable.
If rights can be capriciously and arbitrarily curtailed by armed agents of the state while effete judges yeet sternly-worded letters into the void, then those "rights" are worth about as much as the USA's signature on an international treaty. Which is to say, nothing.
I don't know if you've ever read any Bill/Declaration of Rights, but they all have "this right shall not be violated unless the law allows it" provisions. Many of them even have "oh, and requiring state licensing to exercise such right is not violating it" provisions (see e.g. "This Article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises" in Article 10 of ECHR).
The 4th, 5th, 7th do have such provisions. And despite the 1th amendment prohibiting the Congress from "abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press", both war-time censorship and prohibition of pacifist/anti-war propaganda has been found to be constitutional during the WWI.
wild that it took abortion for people to notice. the same cameras have been feeding ICE lookups across 5,000+ towns, quietly, for the last couple years
Education is often best achieved through spaced repetition and cross-discipline integration, especially with the intent of connecting something with someone’s personal life to sink it deeper.
A single news article ever, or 1000 news articles that don’t impact “you specifically” are less effective than measured repetition across multiple fronts.
These people really have nothing better to do?